A bull elk, right, bugles to a female elk during mating rituals. The elk mating season draws hundreds of tourists to Rocky Mountain National Park every fall, hoping for a glimpse of the sometimes spectacular elk battles.

PINE, CO - OCTOBER 3: An elk grazes in a meadow outside Staunton State Park near Pine, Colorado early Thursday morning, October 3, 2013. (Photo By Patrick Traylor/The Denver Post)

Big game hunting ultimately isn’t all that different from other sports. Win or lose, eventually the season comes to an end. Then what?

For the vast majority, it’s back to the drawing board. Time to regroup, review the strategy and figure out what went wrong. Or maybe more accurately, where.

“Hunting success is a mix of a lot of different elements. Individual hunter skill definitely comes into play, and the willingness to actually hike and get away from people plays a big part, along with the willingness to prescout an area to find out where the elk actually are,” said Mike Holle, a lifelong Colorado elk hunter and creator of new maps and the website, StartMyHunt.com. “But as far as what you can do sitting at a computer, these maps can show you where to find elk before you even start scouting an area.”

As woodsy as any outdoorsman likes to consider himself, there’s not a hunter out there who doesn’t appreciate the advantage of some scientific study. With a degree in natural resource management from Colorado State that heavily emphasizes geographic information systems, Holle brings exactly that to his pet project. The hunter of nearly 35 years first applied his aptitude for interpreting the trends of big game animals to work as an environmental consultant before recognizing their potential benefits to the hunting community in the form of customized maps detailing more than 6,000 elk hunting “hot spots” in Colorado west of Interstate 25.

“What I did was take a lot of the information and parameters that agencies like the Forest Service, fish and game departments and the Bureau of Land Management had established and I defined what I initially called ‘security habitat.’ That’s where the animals will tend to go when they feel hunting pressure or increased activity from development or motorized use or other disturbances,” Holle said. “To my knowledge, I don’t think anybody has ever created a map like this before. The other thing that’s unique is that I’ve defined prime forage areas and secondary forage areas and where they overlap with the security habitat. Those are areas that elk may stay for an entire season.”

Holle will be the first to admit he didn’t do all the research himself. The data is out there. All he did was spend a few years collecting the pertinent information and filtering it into a format people can easily digest as a $35 map or an $80 DVD.

“I’ve looked through these huge Colorado Parks and Wildlife statistics pages listing hunter success rates in various GMUs (Game Management Units) and such, and it’s not real easy to make any sense of it the way they’ve presented it,” Holle said. “I’ve had quite a bit of luck in making it into something people can understand and discern more easily.”

To date, Holle has only his own testimonial to rely upon, however. Although the feedback was positive from StartMyHunt.com’s debut at the International Sportsmen’s Expo in Denver last month, field testing thus far was limited to last fall’s snow-doused hunt on the Grand Mesa that quickly drove herds off the hillside he’s hunted alongside his father for years.

As the name implies, new and out-of-state hunters clearly stand to benefit most from the information Start My Hunt offers.

With the grid established, maps can be customized to hunters’ requests, using various layers of graphic information systems to provide detailed information on the quality of ground cover ranging far beyond the basics of Google Earth.

“The information is out there. I’ve just taken it and mixed it together and applied parameters to achieve the desired output that I’m looking for,” Holle said. “I feel strongly that you can save time and pinpoint areas to check out and hunt during the season. It may take a little more work to get to those areas, but you’ll have a lot more chance for success once you do. I think that makes it a good investment.”

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